Saturday, October 30, 2010

The Python Software Foundation awarded the second quarter Community
Service Award to John Pinner in recognition of his organizational
skills and contributions as one of the primary organizers of PyCon UK
and EuroPython.

Friday, October 29, 2010

The development team of the Python interpreter (a.k.a python-dev) is
organizing a bug weekend on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st of November.

We would like to encourage anyone who feels interested in participating
to give it a try. Contributing to Python is much less intimidating than
it sounds. You don't need to have previous experience with modifying
the Python source; in fact bug days offer a good opportunity to learn
the basics by asking questions and working on relatively simple bugs
(see "how to get prepared" below). And most core developers are actual
human beings!

The bug week-end will happen on the #python-dev IRC channel on the
Freenode network, where several core developers routinely hang out. No
physical meeting is scheduled, but anyone is encouraged to organize one and announce it on the official Python channels such as this one.

Participants (you!) join #python-dev and collaboratively go through the
Python issue tracker at http://bugs.python.org . From there, you can
provide patches and/or review existing patches. Also, you can help us
assess issues on any specific topic you have expertise in (the range of
topics touched in the stdlib is quite broad and it is more than likely
that the core developers' expertise is lacking in some of them).

Or, if you feel shy, you can simply watch other people work and get more conf
ident about participating yourself. Development is public and lurkers are welcome.

Our expectation is that Python 3.2 beta 1 will have been released a
couple of days before the bug week-end and, therefore, one primary goal
is to polish the 3.2 branch for the following betas and the final
release. There are many issues to choose from on the bug tracker; any
bug fixes or documentation improvements will do. New features are
discouraged: they can't be checked in before the official 3.2 release.

Monday, October 18, 2010

The Python Software Foundation supported many Google Summer of Code
(GSoC) Projects this year by recruiting mentors and supporting
projects from around the community. As the summer comes to a close, we
thought it would be a good idea to let you know how things turned out,
so we contacted a few of the participants to ask them about their
experience.

Carl Meyer from the pip project told us that "the primary goals for
the summer were setting up a continuous integration server for pip,
speeding up the tests and making them runnable without network access,
and porting pip to Python 3. The first and last got done fully, the
middle one mostly done. And Hugo Lopes Tavares closed a number of
miscellaneous tickets along the way as well."

Carl also told us that he enjoyed being a mentor for the project. Hugo
went on to join Globo.com when GSoC was over and thinks that his
experience with GSoC helped him get hired.

Laurent Gautier of the rpy2 project also enjoyed being a mentor. His
project was to get rpy2 compatible with Python 3 on the C-level and to
do some custom R graphical devices with rpy2. They were able to
complete their project.

Fernando Perez was the mentor for the IPython work done by Omar Andrés
Zapata Mesa and Gerardo Gutierrez. They worked on separate but related
projects that dealt with a multi-process model of kernel hosting for
IPython and some client software using the ZeroMQ messaging library.

Julian Habrock, the student for the PyGame project, posted his work
as he did it on a blog. He worked
on a new draw module for pygame and pygame2 with mentor, Marcus Von Appen.
Julian thought the project was fun and he learned how to organize bigger
projects and encourages other studentswho have the time and motivation to
join GSoC next year.

Let us know what your project did this summer! The Google Summer of
Code website lists many Python-related projects,
but the level of detail online is inconsistent. If you would like to
let us know what your project accomplished, please send an email to
mike at pythonlibrary dot org.

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.